In Britain, Sarah Kane has become a strangely marginal figure. The playwright, who committed suicide in 1999, shocked us rigid with Blasted and bequeathed us a posthumous poem in 4.48 Psychosis, but has not entered the theatrical mainstream. Performances of her work outside the university circuit are startlingly rare. In the rest of Europe, however, Kane is widely regarded as the most significant dramatist to have emerged from any source in the past decade. Why this staggering disparity of perception?

In Germany, Berlin's leading theatre, the Schaubühne, has just launched an explosive new production of Blasted (Zerbombt). Astonishingly, this means that Kane's five surviving plays are now all in the Schaubühne repertoire. To mark the event, the theatre mounted a symposium in which directors, actors and designers talked about her work. A British contingent - comprising the Royal Court's Graham Whybrow, the writer Aleks Sierz and myself - addressed her equivocal reputation at home.

A clue to the different perceptions of Kane's work lies in the list of British dramatists currently featuring alongside her in the Schaubühne repertory: Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, Mark Ravenhill. If one adds David Harrower - another favourite of the Schaubühne's director, Thomas Ostermeier - to that list, it becomes clear that European theatres are drawn to the non-naturalistic, poetic strand in British drama. But the specific European worship of Kane is the result of a belief that she possessed, more than any of her contemporaries, a prophetic awareness of our modern, terror-haunted world.

Ostermeier virtually said as much in one of the Schaubühne panels. Like James Macdonald, who premiered much of Kane's work in Britain, Ostermeier spoke warmly of her as a person. "When she first came to Berlin," he said, "we expected to meet an aggressive punk but found her charming and funny. The first question she asked was why we weren't doing more German dramatists instead of all these British writers. But, although she was part of a generation accused of an obsession with sex and violence, I believe there was something much deeper at work. The startling thing about Blasted is that it makes more sense now than when it was first staged 10 years ago. It is about something we currently understand: the fear that, at any moment, our whole society may be ripped apart."

Famously, Kane was impelled to extend her initial study of a domestic rape by the pressure of events in Bosnia - hence the intrusion of civil war into a Leeds hotel room. But, in Ostermeier's dazzling production, everything has been updated. When Ian, the middle-aged journalist, and the naive Cate switch on the hotel room's television, there are constant references to Falluja. The cataclysmic explosion that destroys the hotel graphically evokes everything we have read about Iraq. And theintruding soldier, involved in acts of torture and desperate for his story to be told, stirs disquieting reminders of Abu Ghraib. This is not mere factitious topicality: it is all latent in Kane's play, which envisions the horrors of civil war.

Ostermeier's production and Jan Pappelbaum's design are technically extraordinary in showing a white-walled hotel room reduced to a heap of rubble. And Ulrich Mühe as Ian and Katharina Schüttler as Cate convey the erotic tension of their relationship. The former's habit of simultaneously smoking and breathing from an oxygen tank even comically suggests Ian's feverish death wish.

However brilliant the production, though, it still leaves me questioning Kane's argument. Her play explicitly suggests there is a direct connection between private and public violence. As she told Sierz: "One is the seed and the other is the tree." But, dramatically, Kane juxtaposes two kinds of horror without proving their essential link. If her play survives, it is not simply as a political prophecy but as a vision of the desperate need for human contact. The whole play drives inexorably to the strangely moving moment when the blinded and entombed Ian is fed and nourished by Cate, and he utters the simple words: "Thank you."

James Macdonald describes Sarah Kane as "a romantic"; if she exercises a continuing hold over the European imagination, it is because of this continuing tension between love and cruelty in her work. You see this clearly in Cleansed (Gesäubert), my least favourite of her plays, which is given a riveting production at the Schaubühne by a young Australian, Benedict Andrews. It is staged in a circular, concrete cavern with a sunken pool that fills with inky water to convey the institutional cruelties the play describes. However, the images that linger are the moments of rhapsodic tenderness - for example, when a brother (Lars Eidinger) and sister (Jule Böwe) make passionate love in the pool and gaze at each other as if they had momentarily glimpsed paradise.

Ostermeier's production of Crave (Gier) also reminds us how much Kane had progressed as a writer. When I first saw it, I took the play to be a poetically allusive meditation on the obsessive nature of love. But Ostermeier, who has the four actors speaking urgently into microphones, reminds us that behind the interwoven monologues lies a perfectly coherent story about abuse and betrayal. Like Beckett's Play, it is a distillation of a concrete human experience.

"How good was Sarah Kane?" asked the chairman of one of the Berlin panels. It is a difficult question to answer - especially for someone who reacted to Blasted in 1995 with myopic incomprehension. The danger is of guiltily overpraising a writer one had initially spurned. But, having seen 4.48 Psychosis last year in Chile and now three more Kane productions in Berlin, I believe she is an artist who easily crosses national boundaries. If we still find it hard to grasp her in Britain, it is because of her ruthlessly uncompromising vision and total rejection of our naturalistic inheritance. The whirligig of time, however, brings in its revenges - and I suspect, judging by her campus popularity, that the next generation of theatre-makers will intuitively understand her black humour and romantic agony.